It was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Another poorly-targeted, generic sales pitch, popping up in my inbox. AI-generated, of course. Bypassing my spam filter - for now - somehow. The difference? This time it was from someone I knew. Was I surprised? No. Disappointed? Yes. And irritated.
The business world is being overtaken by AI. For many applications, it is brilliant. It has allowed me to build tools and solve problems at a pace that was unthinkable just a few months ago. But AI lowers the friction in many different business disciplines. Not just research, analysis and coding, but writing and communicating too. And this is where it becomes a problem.
Spam by another name
The spam filters that have for many years managed the tidal wave of phishing attempts, crypto scams and offers of dodgy financial transactions are failing to stem the tide of AI generated personalised sales pitches. While at the same time our social networks are being swamped with bland, generic, boring content.
The justification for all this, is that it works. People try a system and maybe it delivers a few leads from its five thousand attempts. And they think that makes it OK.
It does not.
The ‘No Headphones’ of the business world
It seems appropriate to complain about this in the week that Andy Burnham has launched a campaign against noise pollution on trains. People watching videos or listening to music on their phones without headphones. AI sales pitches are the ‘no headphones’ behaviour of the business environment. One person blasting out noise for their own benefit to the irritation of 99.9% of the rest of the population. Maybe the 0.1% might listen and think, “That’s a banger.“ But that’s no justification.
Spam is profitable for precisely this reason. It doesn’t matter to the spammer how much time and money the rest of the world spends filtering out their bullshit, if a small fraction of the messages reach willing recipients. Very few people would argue that spam is a good thing. Yet somehow many of our peers seem happy to have become spammers in the name of profit.
GDPR?
So what happened to all the legislation we created to protect us from behaviour like this. The 2003 Privacy and Electronic Communications regulations say that organisations need prior consent before sending marketing emails. GDPR reinforced this: recipients must actively opt in. Except for one loophole: none of this applies when you’re emailing a business on a business email address.
As businesses, we are at the mercy of the new generation of spammers.
Quality not quantity
My hardline position would be this: stop. No more AI generated sales campaigns, pitches, blogs or LinkedIn posts. My more nuanced position is this: if you are going to use these tools, use them well. Don’t be lazy. Be laser focused in your targeting. Tailor your content and your messages properly. Get your rules right. And if AI is doing the first draft, for the sake of my sanity and your credibility, you’d better do a good editing job.
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Note: the image accompanying this post is absolutely AI generated. But it’s good! It perfectly illustrates the story. I’m not anti-AI, just anti lazy AI usage..